The Cradle Place: Poems

By Thomas Lux

The Cradle Place is a collection from Thomas Lux, a self-described "recovering surrealist" and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.

These fifty-two poems bring to full life the "refreshing iconoclasms" Rita Dove so admired in Lux's earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, humorous and edgy, and ever surprising.

These are philosophical poems that ask questions about language and intention, about the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. In the poem "Terminal Lake," Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark currents beneath the surface: "it's a huge black coin, / it's as if the real lake is drained / and this lake is the drain: gaping, language- / less, suck- and sinkhole." In the ominous "Render, Render," the narrator asks us to consider a concentration of the essences of our lives: all that is physical, spiritual, remembered, and dreamed for, melded together to make the messy self we present to the world.

Lux's voice is intelligent without being bookish, urgent and unrelentingly evocative. He has long been a strong advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture. The Los Angeles Times praises Lux for his "compelling rhythms, his biting irony, and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless." As Sven Birkerts noted, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends."

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 6, 2007
• ISBN: 9780547347080

Thomas Lux

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Book preview

I

The Late Ambassadorial Light

Light reaches through a leaf

and that light, diminished, passes through

another leaf,

and another, down

to the lawn beneath.

Green, green, the high grass shivers.

Water over a stone, and bees,

bees around the flowers, deep-tiered beds

of them, yellows and golds and reds.

Saw-blade ferns feather in the breeze.

And, just as a cloud’s corner

catches the sun, a tiny glint in the garden—the milk

of a broken stalk? A lion’s tooth?

Or might that be the delicate labia

of an orchid?

Say You’re Breathing

just as you do every day, in and out, in and out, and in each

breath: one tick

of a shaving from a bat’s eyelash, an invisible sliver

of a body mite

who lived near Caligula’s shin, diamond dust (we each inhale a carat

in a lifetime), a speck of scurf

from the Third Dynasty (that of the abundant

imbeciles), one sulfurous grain

from the smoke of a mortar round, a mote of marrow

from a bone poking through a shallow grave,

a whiff from a mummy grinder

caught in a Sahara wind, most of the Sahara